


tonight might be my night to reminisce

by friendly_ficus



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Multi, Post-Canon, background alissa/character growth, based on my memory of canon so only relatively canon compliant, more a series of snapshots than a larger narrative, new york people don’t come for me over anything in this fic i’ve never been to your city, thinkin bout rebirth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23474230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: Rowan Berry, entanglements old and new.(What you should know: none of this makes it into the interviews, the profiles, the puff pieces.)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 38





	1. Alissa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alissa is not the knight of a new age.

It’s not that Alissa is stupid. Misty never would’ve hired a girl that was stupid. It’s just that, well, she has a history of poor timing; that business with the  _ mirror  _ had been a nightmare and a half to untangle. And she’d once forgotten to pick up the dry cleaning. And on her first day two years ago she’d messed up the coffee order. 

Still, Alissa isn’t stupid. So when she comes to Rowan with a file of aesthetic options to start focusing the Instagram profile around, Rowan listens. 

_ “Rowan Berry at Rest,”  _ Alissa pitches as they get out of the cab outside of Rowan’s agent’s office. “It’s a good idea for your brand, people want to feel close to their stars. Just a picture of you, I don’t know, meditating or reading or something. Maybe a candle burning. You don’t have to open up, please  _ God  _ do not open up, but it should feel like you have.”

“Alissa, I’m hardly a star right  _ now.  _ This doesn’t seem like something we need to worry about yet.” 

Alissa frowns as they walk in, frowns as she waits in the lobby of the building. She’s still frowning when Rowan comes down, glowing. 

“I’m not a social media manager,” she says as they push through the doors, the chill of an autumn wind making her shiver. “I can’t tell you the best strategies to take. But you should consider  _ something—” _

“Alissa, enough,” Rowan snaps, biting back something mean. “I don’t want to talk about this, we’re going to be late for the three o’clock meeting.”

“The meeting is at two-thirty,” her assistant corrects.

“Yes, that.”

“Of course, Ms. Berry,” Alissa says with a funny little movement, the mockery of a bow. She’s angry, jaw tight, but Rowan thinks of her agent’s grin, calling her  _ a rising star,  _ and does the thing a bigger person does. She lets it go.

\---

Three days later, over bagels in the kitchen, Rowan is tired of this icy, deferent assistant. She doesn’t like deference as much as Misty had, she’s finding. Deference impedes progress. Deference is old, is out, is a cue that could stand to be missed.

“Alissa...” she trails off, as Alissa stops taking notes and eating her everything bagel. She’s gotten rid of her pink pen, Rowan realizes, traded it in for something slick and black and boring.  _ Young professionals these days,  _ she thinks, and then,  _ so am I. _

Alissa sighs and sets her bagel down so both hands are free. “We should talk about the social media thing,” she offers, and Rowan blinks.

When no one interrupts her, she keeps talking: “Ms. Berry, I know that you don’t want to share anything too private, but it’s...” she stops, Alissa, who always stops at inconvenient times and expects other people to fill the rest in.

“It’s  _ what,  _ Alissa,  _ what is it?”  _ She feels off-balance, realizing that she’s noticed Alissa’s new pen and the way she’s tied back her hair, realizing that she knows her assistant’s preferred bagel order, realizing that it isn’t like it was; she can’t slip back into the old dynamic like a favorite pair of shoes—once Misty vetoed something, Alissa  _ never  _ brought it back up, not once.

“It’s just a mask, you know? It doesn’t have to be real. But you, you need to look human,” Alissa picks her bagel back up but keeps her eyes on Rowan, who reaches for her coffee.

The silence hangs between them, fragile for a moment. Rowan thinks of carefully spun glass, full of unspoken things. She glances at the reflection of her assistant in the ornate mirror that she’s kept out of some strange sentiment, even if it was not exactly typical kitchen decor. Alissa, who schedules meetings at inconvenient times, who jumps when car doors slam too loudly, does not even swallow audibly like she used to. There’s a spark in her eyes that’s never been there before, a defiance—she’s close to crossing a line but for once is unwilling to backpedal. Or maybe it’s just the first time.

Rowan looks away first. “I’m not... I want to perform for people, not be something they consume.” She drinks from her novelty Tinkerbell mug, a gag gift from the Team Dream Secret Santa last Christmas. The coffee is lukewarm, and it’s not sweet enough. Rowan likes sweet things, she’s found.

“Then don’t be consumed. Just figure out this new performance.” Alissa quirks a very slight smile. “We can run lines, if you like. We can pick a different aesthetic, if you don’t like the soft shit. I know someone who runs seven different corporate socials, if you want to get a professional opinion.” She stands and slips around where Rowan’s leaning against the counter, puts another pot of coffee on.

Alissa had never cursed in front of Misty, either. She’d never even used the coffee machine in this kitchen, as far as Misty had known. 

She knows something; Rowan sees it in her eyes, in the careful way she says ‘human’ and in the books on various mythologies she’s always carrying around these days. The Umbral Arcana won’t let her get too close to the truth, especially if Rowan leans on it, but she finds the idea... unpleasant. She doesn’t want to sit back and let it all work itself out; Alissa schedules her meetings, she follows her to some of them. She could walk into anything, really, and Rowan dislikes the idea of her being unprepared. Of making a promise she doesn’t understand, of thanking the wrong person and finding herself indebted.

Misty hadn’t really worried about Alissa much. She’d been the latest in a long line of assistants, an interruption, an occasional disappointment. Well, that won’t do now. She’d been one of Misty’s many; she is Rowan’s  _ first.  _

“I suppose it won’t hurt to look at some things,” she says, as Alissa hums and tops off her coffee, slides the sugar bowl over. “Alissa...” she trails off again.

“What?”

“Why are you still here?” Rowan hadn’t asked, had assumed that she would stay before they could even get a new contract drawn up. “I, I’m sure Misty left an excellent reference for you somewhere around here, if you want it.”

“Well, you pay me a lot of money for my work, first of all. And this job comes with dental insurance, which is something I  _ definitely  _ wouldn’t have in most similar positions. And Rowan,” she says, a little daring, “you take a lot of meetings with interesting people these days. People outside the business. It seems like you’re doing something important.”

Rowan looks at her and thinks of a hundred stories of travelers wandering off the forest path, of girls spinning straw into gold, of labyrinths and names and humans and things that were not human and could never hope to be. Those are not good blueprints; old stories, old modes of thinking. 

Alissa is so very human, here in the kitchen, the dark circles under her eyes standing out in the gray light of the morning. She is nothing like a child at a wishing well. She is nothing like a knight in a tale of chivalry. Nothing like a magician. She’s got a papercut on her ring finger; Rowan saw her get it flipping through a volume of Yeats.

“Would you—Alissa, if I told you something secret, would you keep it to yourself?”

“Absolutely.” And it's so true Rowan can taste it in the air.

So on a Thursday morning in late October, just under a year from the formation of the Third Court, Rowan Berry lays all her cards on the table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title for this fic comes from ‘This Manhattan Man,’ by the Altogether. yes because new york is in the song. you’re lucky it wasn’t something from sinatra, honestly.  
> i miss the unsleeping city, i really do, and i love rowan so much but i don’t think she really thinks of Alissa as... a person, at least at first. but i wanted to hang out with her character more, and it seemed like a good idea to write about her navigating relationships that were built around Misty Moore that would inevitably change. rowan berry is a whole new person, which is. super interesting to me.keeping these pretty short and sweet, in the hopes that i’ll finish faster haha, tags will update as the fic does  
> leave a comment and let me know what you think!


	2. Bobby Goodfellow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The thing with Bobby is, hey, you can’t go wrong with a classic.

The faerie bar in Nod is quiet for once, soft music coming from a couple of fauns in the corner, an upright bass hauled in along with an upright piano and the sighing singing of an air elemental. The light is soft and yellow and undemanding. Beside her, Bobby Goodfellow swirls scotch around in a glass. They’re having that drink he offered months ago; it’s been a little while, but they always seem to run back into each other.

“Listen, I know they’d been fucking again—”

“You know they were fucking because I told you they were fucking,” he reminds her.

“Yes, I remember.  _ Anyway,  _ is he planning any retaliation for the...?” Rowan trails off, waving a hand in a way that only subtly nods to killing.

“Well,” Bobby says, leaning closer, “Misty Moore killed Titania, you know? And Misty Moore is dead.” A smile twists across his mouth and he raises his glass for a toast. Their glasses  _ clink  _ and he says, “Long live Rowan Berry.”

She laughs. “That’s a thin facade to cling to, don’t you think?”

“Isn’t that all we are?” He finishes his drink and turns more fully to her, suggestion in their closeness, in the tilt of his head and the glint in his eyes. There's an intimacy there.

He'd seen her eyes before the rest of her, reflected in some mirror in the bar. He knows what the rest of her face looks like, of course, but he'd seen her eyes first. The eyes are always the same.

She reaches out to touch his coat, runs a hand along the material. Rowan’s hand on his lapel is strange—she lacks some element of faerie he’d been expecting, feels solid in a way she never did back home—and her teeth look so new when she smiles.

“Oh, Bobby,” she murmurs, “I think we’re very real. It’s just, well, we change in our own ways.”

\---

The sheets in the hotel room, dreamed up by a hundred people who imagined living in a palace once upon a time, are gold silk. 

Rowan laughs when she sees them, asks if he thinks it’s tacky. Misty’d never been too concerned with tacky, from what he remembers, but in the past she’s had distinct thoughts about decor and the way things should be done. They’d argued about the value of settees before she’d gotten on that steamship in her stolen pair of shoes.

Her hand, still a little heavier he’s used to, slips up the front of his jacket and curls around the base of his neck. Her thumb draws a pattern on his skin and he is, he is—it isn’t what it used to be, with him and her, but since when has change stopped the two of them. 

“Baby,” he says, caught a little on a laugh, “it’s whatever we want it to be.” It always is, for the two of them.

They make it across the room somehow, not paying attention to the particulars. She pushes him down playfully and he falls, half-acting a swoon all the way to the bed. 

_ Queen,  _ he thinks, bringing up a hand to tangle in her short hair as she drags her teeth across his throat,  _ you could’ve been a queen.  _

She could steal him. She could steal Bobby if she really wanted to. It’d be something of a coup for her new little court, really zhuzh the place up a bit to have him around. He knows she knows it, and she knows he knows she knows. If she liked him any less, maybe—no, not even then. Not Rowan Berry. Bobby isn’t shoes, isn’t a crown, isn’t a thing to  _ take. _ From everything he’s heard, that’s not the direction she’s pushing her crowd in anyway.

“Stop thinking about  _ work,” _ she urges. “Let’s have a little  _ fun  _ again.”

And hey, he wants that too, so they do.

\---

In the morning, in what passes for morning in Nod, Rowan stirs first. He sighs and she rises from the tangle of silk and looks down at him, prone and smiling—he has the runaway idea of getting up to kneel and pledge his service before discarding it as one: something she wouldn’t want and two: something he can’t do. 

He’s  _ Oberon’s,  _ he reminds himself, he has to remind himself that he’s  _ Oberon’s.  _ The thing about her is, hey, sometimes when they're together, he forgets. Even now, in the purple light of the sixth borough. Even here, where her teeth are sharp and new.

_ We oppose and are in opposition defined by them,  _ he’d said once, meaning the Seelie but also meaning her and him, business and pleasure, mirrors and crowns and orders he always ends up following.

Rowan grins when she kisses him goodbye. The cold metal of the pin on her jacket brushes against his searching hand; she doesn’t stay. He doesn’t ask her to.

Still, when he sighs after the door closes, still. He scrubs the back of his hand over his mouth, smiles his own smile. Still, for the two of them there’s always next time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bobby’s operating in my playlist of Yearning Sinatra Songs (specifically the good life and summer wind) while rowan’s on a newer version of the same kind of song (think the john barrowman rendition of it’s all right with me). everything about her is a little faster, a little sharper than it used to be. they still fit together, it’s just a different fit. so, a brief look at the two of them; i don’t think their relationship evolves in any new way. i think it's interesting to look at things that would stay the same  
> next time: When the implications are dizzying, just discard the implications. (aka yeah so, uh, rowan and the american dream huh)  
> leave a comment and let me know what you think!


	3. The American Dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the implications are dizzying, put them out with the garbage.

Masquerades are common in Nod the way that  _ anything _ is common in Nod—which is to say, there are plenty of dreams about dancing, there are plenty of dreams about masks, and there are enough dreaming minds to combine the two at any given time. Rowan likes them, likes the aspect of theatre woven through these kinds of things. The cliche of it is like champagne bubbles on her tongue, delightful and ticklish. 

Pete’s not here tonight, which is a shame; he’s becoming a very good dancer and it’s fun to just be near him in Nod, to watch things waver and change with his proximity. These Vox Phantasma, always a thrill. Josefina’d been a wonderful excitement too.

It means that Rowan doesn’t have a ready-made partner, that’s all. Bobby’s probably around here somewhere, or could be if she wanted him, but he’s old news tonight. She doesn’t want the familiar, nice as it can be. And she’s got  _ no desire  _ to tangle with other representatives of the Seelie or Unseelie at this party.

There’s a step behind her and she turns, the lace edge of her mask brushing against her cheekbones. Tall and long-limbed in a deep blue suit, almost unsettlingly stretched out, someone offers her a hand. She’s Rowan Berry; she takes it.

They move to the center of the ballroom, weaving between dancers and floating bits of song. The music around them shifts into something interesting, a mix of a waltz and a swing number and an ABBA cover, but neither of them falter. In Nod, you know the steps. It’s part of the party.

The music takes Rowan out into a spin away from her partner, only linked by their joined hands, and the hand in hers is a steamship railing, and the arms that pull her back in are bridge cables in her mind.

“It’s you,” she breathes, and from behind the mask she gets the impression of a smile.

The American Dream is wearing a classic mask—half comedy, half tragedy, covering the whole face. Rowan amuses herself wondering if it was chosen with her in mind, specifically. It’s April, now, four months since New Year’s Eve. She wonders if that’s long enough for them to make new impressions on each other.

After two songs they disregard most of the dancing—knowing the steps means knowing when you can ignore them—and simply sway in place, the music keeping up the fiction that it isn’t just an embrace.

“Let’s get some air,” she murmurs, the champagne-bubble feeling buzzing in her brain, some part of her crying out in joy, crying  _ you exist, you already exist, didn’t I tell you so? _

There’s a garden through big double doors because there’s always a garden at a masquerade. There’s probably a hedge mage if she feels like looking for one, or a wishing well, or a fountain surrounded by twinkling lights. The two of them walk arm-in-arm on the cobblestone path that almost glows in the moonlight. Rowan glances up, once, and the Moon winks at her.

They don’t talk much, just bask in each others’ presence. Nod is the land of dreams, of miracles—this might be all Rowan dreaming it up, but the elbow locked in hers feels real as anything else.

They come to a stop at, ah, of course. A gazebo draped in ivy that’s speckled with dew, shining like stars. 

“I love you,” Rowan says, and the breeze that rustles the garden raises goosebumps on her skin. “I’d like to kiss you, if you’d enjoy it.”

The kiss is like. No, the kiss isn’t  _ like  _ anything. The kiss is opening an art installation and getting a grant awarded and writing the next great novel and coming home to a house that is yours and making the world better for whoever comes next and—

The American Dream grips her gently by the shoulders and the mask slips back down over a shadowy jawline. “Was that good? I don’t always have a mouth, it’s. Complicated.”

“I mean, I made out with the  _ Moon,  _ don’t even worry about it.”  _ Yes,  _ her breathing is coming a little short,  _ yes,  _ her head is spinning a little,  _ yes,  _ it feels like she’s just narrowly avoided being swept away. She kind of wants to go for another.

“You love me,” the American Dream says softly. “I’m so many things, though.”

Rowan raises one hand to her lips, feels how they’re cold and burning. 

“Yes. And I love you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, rewatching the TUC finale: i just think rowan should be allowed to kiss the american dream


End file.
